About

Warhammer Age of Sigmar Champions Savagery is the second expansion for PlayFusion’s CCG. Savagery brings in some new factions for the Grand Alliances with Nurgle, Sylvaneth, Arkhan’s Legion and The Gloomspite Gitz. We’ve been playing Warhammer Age of Sigmar Champions since release and you can check out our coverage of the Core Set and the first expansion, Onslaught.

In this article, we’re going to have a look at our favorite new deck using some of the new cards from Savagery.

A Savagery Champion has already been errata’d. This is the original Horticulous Slimux.

One of the new Champions who has already caused a stir and subsequently been errata’d is the Horticulous Slimux. Its original ability allowed you to deploy a demon unit from your deck before your first turn, which then rotated as soon as your turn began. This gave the deployed unit a free corner rotation and also usually worked into the rotation of the champion’s quests. It’s a guaranteed ability that happens at the start of every game, simply for taking the Slimux and having a demon unit in your deck. Your opponent wasn’t able to do anything about it. It worked very well with Tzaangor Skyfires in allowing the Skarbrand deck to draw extra cards early.

The new errata of the card means that the ability now happens at the end of your turn, so at least your opponent has a chance to react in their next turn to the unit before the corner rotates.

The Skarbrand deck we’ve discussed before hasn’t changed much with the new set. Adding in Horticulous Slimux and taking out the spells, opting for a direct damage approach is very popular in the current meta. But rather than expand on our previous deck, we’re going to discuss a Chaos deck that uses one of our favorite cards from the set.

Plague Swarm

Champions

Horticulous Slimux

Gaunt Summoner

2x Exalted Deathbringer

Blessings

Anraheir’s Claw

Beastly Leap

Gaze of Nurgle

Unrivalled Battle-Lust

Deck

7x Festering Nurglings

3x Summon Daemon

3x Costly Ritual

2x Gift of Change

3x Battle Tactics

3x Blood Hunt

3x Daemonic Fury

3x Furious Strike

3x Scorn of Sorcery

Festering Nurglings, one of the new units from Warhammer AoS Champions Savagery.

In Savagery, one of the new Chaos cards is Festering Nurglings. The usual card limit for decks in Champions is 3, but Festering Nurglings allows you to take 7 in your deck. The reason for this is that they are a 4 corner low damage unit, that increases its damage by 1 for each adjacent Festering Nurglings unit. The object of the deck is to get as many Nurglings in play so that they can boost each other across the board. Luckily Chaos has several ways of pulling units from your deck and discard pile so having to draw them to your hand isn’t essential.

The Champions used in our Warhammer AoS Champions Nurgle Swarm deck.

The Champions and their positioning at the start of the game is fairly straight-forward. It’s better to have the Gaunt Summoner on one edge as your predominant unit Champions are better if they’re all adjacent. This means that the Nurglings will all be boosting each other more often. The Summoner can deploy units with a spell, but if he’s in the middle of the others, it means that more often than not, there could be a gap in the units. His Heroic Act also lets you pull units from your discard pile to your hand at the cost of 2 damage to yourself. Save this ability for later in the game, when you’re pushing for a finish or you’ve run out of Nurglings in your deck.

The other three Champions are there for one purpose only, making the most of the Nurglings. The Slimux helps to get one out straight away and even with the errata that’s essential for the deck. You need to get the Nurglings in play and rotating into your discard pile so thinning your deck for one is very useful.

The two Deathbringers increase the damage on the final corner of your Nurglings. Having 2 or 3 Nurlings running in tandem on the Deathbringers can be quite powerful on their last corners. It lets them dish out 4 damage on a solo Nurgling, but 6 damage with 2 adjacent Nurgling units, plus their own boosted damage on top.

The Blessings used in our Warhammer AoS Champions Nurgle Swarm deck.

The Blessings all increase damage, deal damage directly or let you draw cards, but none of them are particularly essential to the deck. If you can get a blessing to go off then it’s a bonus, but don’t aim for them. Getting Nurglings on the table is the goal and you can win games without activating any blessings at all. So avoid making plays just to finish Champion quests over putting Nurglings into play.

Summon Demon is the only spell in the deck and its purpose is to get Nurlings out of your discard pile, so avoid playing it if you don’t have any there. Deploying a unit from your hand is a waste, so avoid using if there’s no discard target.

Gift of Change is a fantastic Wizard ability to play on a Nurgling that’s on its last corner, having already done its damage. It lets you replace it with another Nurgling from your hand or deck. Playing a Nurgling from hand is ok if you’ve still got some other Nurglings in play, otherwise cycling from the deck is key as getting them into play and into your discard pile really help the flow of the deck.

Costly Ritual can be pretty awesome if used correctly. Make sure you have 2 Nurglings in your deck before discarding your hand. If you have an empty hand when you use it, it lets you play 2 Nurglings from your deck with no drawback. Discarding 1 card for a single Nurgling from the deck is an average play. Discarding any more for a single Nurgling should be avoided unless you’re struggling to do damage, but do try to empty your hand before playing.

It’s a real balancing act with Costly Ritual. Having only 7 Nurglings, and drawing one with the Slimux means that there will only 6 left in the deck, 2 for each Costly Ritual. There’s an argument for having 2 Costly Rituals and 3 Gift of Change, but only having 2 reduces your chance of drawing it. I’d rather take the dead card late game and increase my chances of drawing early. There’s also always that chance that you’ll get all three Costly Rituals off drawing 2 Nurglings from each, but that will all depend on how much Nurgle favors you.

Blood Hunt, Furious Strike, Scorn of Sorcery and Demonic Fury are all there to deal damage, control and activate some corners of your Champion’s Quests. They’re flexible in terms of the meta, so if you need to swap out one of them for a card that’s incredibly useful against decks you’re coming up against regularly, then these are the ones to swap.

Battle Tactics is a great card for cycling Nurglings back into your deck and also if you have a second Costly Ritual in your hand. Having 2 Costly Rituals in your hand means that to play one, you have to discard the other. Battle Tactics shuffles it back into your deck, hopefully, to be drawn at a later time. Be careful of drawing too much after putting one back into your deck though, as you may just draw it again before you play the other.

Playing the Deck

Try to stagger your Nurgling placement, so that they are all on different corners. This helps them continue to get boosted damage. If you play two in the same turn, they will both rotate and eventually drop off together, leaving any other Nurglings in play without adjacent units. It’s not essential though, and the drawing power of the Nurglings from the deck and discard pile means that you should shouldn’t have an issue finding a Nurgling.

It does require some patience with card playing though, try to play two cards on the first turn, to set the tempo, then try to settle into one action one card draw each turn. Having a no action turn and drawing 2 cards can hamper this deck as it relies on the number of Nurglings in play to deal its damage. You also run the risk of drawing all your Nurglings or all of the Costly Rituals at the same time. Don’t fret if you do need to draw 2 cards though, just try to settle back into the rhythm next turn.

This deck is a fairly competitive deck. It suffers from not having much control and can be shut down with effective removal or dormant abilities from your opponent. It can be fast if the draw is in your favor and once the Nurglings start to build up, they can be difficult to deal with. It relies on speed and its ability to snowball damage against slower decks. It’s a very straight-forward deck to play, once you’re familiar with the cards. Keeping track of what’s in the deck and discard pile is the biggest challenge.

If you like our deck, you can load it into your game straight from the PlayFusion website here.

Warhammer Age of Sigmar Champions is available on mobile, Steam and now on Nintendo Switch.

We were provided aWarhammer Age of Sigmar Champions Savagery Booster Boxby PlayFusion in order to produce this article.

Have you been playing Warhammer Age of Sigmar Champions? What system do you play on? What Grand Alliance do you play? What’s your favorite card from Savagery? Let us know in the comments below.

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Adam is the Associate Tabletop Editor for TechRaptor. He's been involved in the video game and board game industry since 1997, from managing communities to flavour text writing for CCGs and game development and design and has played physical and digital card games at a high competitive level.